Confidence biases in problem gambling.

Background and aims: Subjective confidence plays an important role in guiding behaviour, especially when objective feedback is unavailable. Systematic misjudgements in confidence can foster maladaptive behaviours and have been linked to various psychiatric disorders. In this study, we adopted a transdiagnostic approach to examine confidence biases in problem gamblers across three levels: local decision confidence, global task performance confidence, and overall self-esteem. The importance of taking a transdiagnostic perspective is increasingly recognised, as it captures the dimensional nature of psychiatric symptoms that often cut across diagnostic boundaries. Accordingly, we investigated if any observed confidence biases could be explained by transdiagnostic symptom dimensions of Anxiety-Depression and Compulsive Behaviour and Intrusive Thought. This approach allows us to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the role of metacognitive processes in problem gambling, beyond the constraints of traditional diagnostic categories. Methods: Thirty-eight problem gamblers and 38 demographically matched control participants engaged in a gamified metacognition task and completed self-report questionnaires assessing transdiagnostic symptom dimensions. Results: Compared to controls, problem gamblers displayed significantly elevated confidence at the local decision and global task levels, independent of their actual task performance. This elevated confidence was observed even after controlling for the heightened symptom levels of Anxiety-Depression and Compulsive Behaviour and Intrusive Thought among the problem gamblers. Discussion: The results reveal a notable disparity in confidence levels between problem gamblers and control participants, not fully accounted for by the symptom dimensions Anxiety-Depression and Compulsive Behaviour and Intrusive Thought. This suggests the contribution of other factors, perhaps linked to gambling-specific cognitive distortions, to the observed confidence biases. Conclusion: The findings highlight the intricate link between metacognitive confidence and psychiatric symptoms in the context of problem gambling. It underscores the need for further research into metacognitive biases, which could enhance therapeutic approaches for individuals with psychiatric conditions.

Metacognitive beliefs, mood symptoms, and fatigue four years after stroke: An explorative study.

OBJECTIVE: This cross-sectional study investigated the relationship between metacognition and mood symptoms four years post-stroke and examined fatigue as a potential moderator for this relationship. METHODS: A number of 143 participants completed a survey that included the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS), the Metacognition Questionnaire-30 (MCQ-30), the Fatigue Severity Scale (FSS), and the modified Rankin Scale (mRS) (functional status) four years after stroke. Multiple regression analyses adjusting for demographic and stroke-specific covariates were performed with anxiety and depression as dependent variables and fatigue as a moderator. RESULTS: The proportions of participants satisfying the caseness criteria for anxiety and depression were 20% and 19%, respectively, and 35% reported severe fatigue. Analysed separately, all MCQ-30 subscales contributed significantly to anxiety, whereas only three MCQ-30 subscales contributed significantly to depression. In the adjusted analyses, the MCQ-30 subscales 'positive beliefs' (p < 0.05) and 'uncontrollability and danger' (p < 0.001), as well as fatigue (p < 0.001) and functional status at four years (p < 0.05) were significantly associated with anxiety symptoms. Similarly, the MCQ-30 subscales 'cognitive confidence' (p < 0.05) and 'self-consciousness' (p < 0.05), as well as fatigue (p < 0.001), stroke severity at baseline (p < 0.01), and functional status at four years (p < 0.01) were significantly associated with depression symptoms. Fatigue did not significantly moderate the relationship between any MCQ-30 subscale and HADS scores. CONCLUSION: Maladaptive metacognitions were associated with the mood symptoms of anxiety and depression, independent of fatigue, even after controlling for demographic and stroke-specific factors. Future studies should implement longitudinal designs to determine whether metacognitions precede anxiety or depression after a stroke, and more strongly indicate the potential of metacognitive therapy for improving the mental health of individuals after a stroke.

Examining interpersonal metacognitive monitoring in artificial grammar learning.

This study investigates the observers' ability to monitor the ongoing cognitive processes of a partner who is implicitly learning an artificial grammar. Our hypothesis posits that learners experience metacognitive feelings as they attempt to apply their implicit knowledge, and that observers are capable of detecting and interpreting these feelings as cues of the learner's cognitive state. For instance, learners might encounter affective signals linked to cognitive conflicts and errors at different processing stages, which observers can construe as manifestations of the learner's cognitive dissonance. The research involved 126 participants organized into dyads, with one participant acting as a learner, and the other as an observer. The observer's task was to judge whether the learner agrees with the information presented (consonance judgment) and was limited to reading the learner's nonverbal signals to avoid explicit mindreading. The findings suggest that observers possess mindreading abilities, enabling them to detect both learners' confidence and accuracy in stimuli classification. This extends our understanding of non-verbal mindreading capabilities and indicates that observers can effectively interpret early implicit metacognitive information, even in the absence of explicit self-evaluation from the learners. This research offers significant insights into how individuals interpret others' mental states during implicit learning tasks, particularly in the context of utilizing early affective cues within the Artificial Grammar Learning paradigm.

Neural mechanisms underpinning metacognitive shifts driven by non-informative predictions.

Humans constantly make predictions and such predictions allow us to prepare for future events. Yet, such benefits may come with drawbacks as premature predictions may potentially bias subsequent judgments. Here we examined how prediction influences our perceptual decisions and subsequent confidence judgments, on scenarios where the predictions were arbitrary and independent of the identity of the upcoming stimuli. We defined them as invalid and non-informative predictions. Behavioral results showed that, such non-informative predictions biased perceptual decisions in favor of the predicted choice, and such prediction-induced perceptual bias further increased the metacognitive efficiency. The functional MRI results showed that activities in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) encoded the response consistency between predictions and perceptual decisions. Activity in mPFC predicted the strength of this congruency bias across individuals. Moreover, the parametric encoding of confidence in putamen was modulated by prediction-choice consistency, such that activity in putamen was negatively correlated with confidence rating after inconsistent responses. These findings suggest that predictions, while made arbitrarily, orchestrate the neural representations of choice and confidence judgment.

Confidence judgments interfere with perceptual decision making.

Determining one's confidence in a decision is a vital part of decision-making. Traditionally, psychological experiments have assessed a person's confidence by eliciting confidence judgments. The notion that such judgments can be elicited without impacting the accuracy of the decision has recently been challenged by several studies which have shown reactivity effects-either an increase or decrease in decision accuracy when confidence judgments are elicited. Evidence for the direction of reactivity effects has, however, been decidedly mixed. Here, we report three studies designed to specifically make reactivity effects more prominent by eliciting confidence judgment contemporaneously with perceptual decisions. We show that confidence judgments elicited contemporaneously produce an impairment in decision accuracy, this suggests that confidence judgments may rely on a partially distinct set of cues/evidence than the primary perceptual decision and, additionally, challenges the continued use of confidence ratings as an unobtrusive measure of metacognition.

Making precise movements increases confidence in perceptual decisions.

Perceptual decision-making often lacks explicit feedback, making confidence in our choices pivotal for guiding subsequent actions. Recent studies have highlighted the role of motor responses in modulating decision confidence. Two competing mechanisms have been proposed to elucidate this phenomenon. The "fluency hypothesis" posits that the ease and smoothness of executing a motor response can serve as a cue to enhance retrospective confidence. Conversely, the "monitoring hypothesis" suggests that the extent of action monitoring during response selection may boost retrospective confidence, with heightened monitoring potentially offsetting response fluency. We conducted a pre-registered experiment to directly test these hypotheses. Participants engaged in a perceptual task involving the discrimination of Gabor patch orientation. Perceptual responses required high or low motor precision, manipulated by the size of target circles that participants had to reach with the computer mouse to provide a response. Contrary to the "fluency hypothesis", our results showed that, in trials requiring higher precision (utilizing small circles), participants reported higher confidence levels compared to trials with less demanding responses (involving larger circles). Importantly, this increase in confidence did not coincide with any change in perceptual accuracy. These findings align with the "monitoring hypothesis," suggesting that the degree of action monitoring during response execution can indeed influence retrospective decision confidence.

Metacognitive therapy versus exposure and response prevention for obsessive-compulsive disorder - A non-inferiority randomized controlled trial.

OBJECTIVE: Exposure with response prevention (ERP) is the first-line treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). However, refusals, dropouts and the required high time and logistic effort constitute barriers to the use of ERP. In a non-inferiority randomized controlled trial, we compared metacognitive therapy (MCT) to exposure with response prevention (ERP) as treatments for OCD. METHOD: 74 outpatients received 12 weekly sessions of either manualized MCT or ERP, with primary outcomes assessed by blinded assessors using the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS) at pre-treatment, mid-treatment, post-treatment, and 6-month follow-up. Secondary outcomes included measures of depression and anxiety. Non-inferiority margin was specified at no less than d = 0.38 below the improvement reached by ERP, corresponding to a difference of about 3 points on the Y-BOCS. RESULTS: Drop-out rates were low (<14%) and similar in both groups. Linear models indicated non-inferiority of MCT to ERP at post-treatment, but not at 6-month follow-up. While both groups showed comparable Y-BOCS improvements, the MCT group demonstrated a significantly greater reduction in state anxiety scores at post-treatment and follow-up. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, MCT was not inferior to ERP, especially at post-treatment, suggesting it could be a treatment alternative. However, further research is needed to explore differential treatment indications.

Distinct neural markers of evidence accumulation index metacognitive processing before and after simple visual decisions.

Perceptual decision-making is affected by uncertainty arising from the reliability of incoming sensory evidence (perceptual uncertainty) and the categorization of that evidence relative to a choice boundary (categorical uncertainty). Here, we investigated how these factors impact the temporal dynamics of evidence processing during decision-making and subsequent metacognitive judgments. Participants performed a motion discrimination task while electroencephalography was recorded. We manipulated perceptual uncertainty by varying motion coherence, and categorical uncertainty by varying the angular offset of motion signals relative to a criterion. After each trial, participants rated their desire to change their mind. High uncertainty impaired perceptual and metacognitive judgments and reduced the amplitude of the centro-parietal positivity, a neural marker of evidence accumulation. Coherence and offset affected the centro-parietal positivity at different time points, suggesting that perceptual and categorical uncertainty affect decision-making in sequential stages. Moreover, the centro-parietal positivity predicted participants' metacognitive judgments: larger predecisional centro-parietal positivity amplitude was associated with less desire to change one's mind, whereas larger postdecisional centro-parietal positivity amplitude was associated with greater desire to change one's mind, but only following errors. These findings reveal a dissociation between predecisional and postdecisional evidence processing, suggesting that the CPP tracks potentially distinct cognitive processes before and after a decision.

Effective modulation from the ventral medial to the dorsal medial portion of the prefrontal cortex in memory confidence-based behavioral control.

Metacognition includes the ability to refer to one's own cognitive states, such as confidence, and adaptively control behavior based on this information. This ability is thought to allow us to predictably control our behavior without external feedback, for example, even before we take action. Many studies have suggested that metacognition requires a brain-wide network of multiple brain regions. However, the modulation of effective connectivity within this network during metacognitive tasks remains unclear. This study focused on medial prefrontal regions, which have recently been suggested to be particularly involved in metacognition. We examined whether modulation of effective connectivity specific to metacognitive behavioral control is observed using model-based network analysis and dynamic causal modeling (DCM). The results showed that negative modulation from the ventral medial prefrontal cortex to the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex was observed in situations that required metacognitive behavioral control but not in situations that did not require such metacognitive control. Furthermore, this modulation was particularly pronounced in the group of participants who could better use metacognition for behavioral control. These results imply hierarchical properties of metacognition-related brain networks.

Confidence ratings do not distinguish imagination from reality.

Perceptual reality monitoring refers to the ability to distinguish internally triggered imagination from externally triggered reality. Such monitoring can take place at perceptual or cognitive levels-for example, in lucid dreaming, perceptual experience feels real but is accompanied by a cognitive insight that it is not real. We recently developed a paradigm to reveal perceptual reality monitoring errors during wakefulness in the general population, showing that imagined signals can be erroneously attributed to perception during a perceptual detection task. In the current study, we set out to investigate whether people have insight into perceptual reality monitoring errors by additionally measuring perceptual confidence. We used hierarchical Bayesian modeling of confidence criteria to characterize metacognitive insight into the effects of imagery on detection. Over two experiments, we found that confidence criteria moved in tandem with the decision criterion shift, indicating a failure of reality monitoring not only at a perceptual but also at a metacognitive level. These results further show that such failures have a perceptual rather than a decisional origin. Interestingly, offline queries at the end of the experiment revealed global, task-level insight, which was uncorrelated with local, trial-level insight as measured with confidence ratings. Taken together, our results demonstrate that confidence ratings do not distinguish imagination from reality during perceptual detection. Future research should further explore the different cognitive dimensions of insight into reality judgments and how they are related.

Multiple paths to rumination within a network analytical framework.

Theories of rumination have proposed different psychological factors to place one at risk for repetitive negative thinking. A comprehensive empirical test that captures the most relevant contributors to rumination is lacking. Building on influential self-regulatory and metacognitive frameworks, we modeled how key constructs in this context relate to ruminative thinking. 498 participants completed online questionnaires including indicators of rumination, metacognition, promotion goal orientation, effortful control, and depression. We estimated regularized partial correlation networks to investigate unique associations between the different constructs and followed these analyses up with directed acyclic graphs to identify potential pathways towards rumination. Results demonstrated that: (1) both self-regulatory and metacognitive factors were directly linked to rumination, amongst these were (2) positive beliefs, negative beliefs about uncontrollability and harm, cognitive self-consciousness, depression, effortful control, perfectionism, and (lack of) cognitive confidence, and (3) we identified multiple directed pathways, suggesting three direct contributors to rumination while controlling for the influence of all other variables: diminished effortful control, positive beliefs, and cognitive self-consciousness. This study is the first to comprehensively assess metacognitive and self-regulatory frameworks of rumination in a data-driven manner. Our findings suggest that there are multiple pathways towards rumination, which should be incorporated in clinical case conceptualization of rumination and related disorders.

Metacognition as a mediator of the relation between family SES and language and mathematical abilities in preschoolers.

The effect of family socioeconomic status (SES) on academic achievement in literacy and numeracy has been extensively studied with educational inequalities already witnessed in preschoolers. This is presumably explained by the effect of family SES on cognitive and socioemotional abilities associated with academic achievement. Metacognition which refers to knowledge and regulation skills involving reflexivity about one's own cognitive processes is one of these abilities. However, most of the studies investigating the association between metacognition and academic achievement have focused on school-aged students and studies with younger students are only emerging. Meanwhile, the association between family SES and metacognition abilities has surprisingly received little attention regardless of participants' age. The aim of this study was to explore the associations between family SES, metacognition, language and mathematical abilities in preschoolers aged 5 to 6. We provide the first evidence that the effect of family SES on preschoolers' language and mathematical abilities is mediated by the effect of family SES on their metacognitive abilities. The implications for future research, education and policies aiming at reducing educational inequalities are discussed.

Elucidating the underlying components of metacognitive systematic bias in the human dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and inferior parietal cortex.

Metacognitive systematic bias impairs human learning efficiency, which is characterized by the inconsistency between predicted and actual memory performance. However, the underlying mechanism of metacognitive systematic bias remains unclear in existing studies. In this study, we utilized judgments of learning task in human participants to compare the neural mechanism difference in metacognitive systematic bias. Participants encoded words in fMRI sessions that would be tested later. Immediately after encoding each item, participants predicted how likely they would remember it. Multivariate analyses on fMRI data demonstrated that working memory and uncertainty decisions are represented in patterns of neural activity in metacognitive systematic bias. The available information participants used led to overestimated bias and underestimated bias. Effective connectivity analyses further indicate that information about the metacognitive systematic bias is represented in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and inferior parietal cortex. Different neural patterns were found underlying overestimated bias and underestimated bias. Specifically, connectivity regions with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and supramarginal gyrus form overestimated bias, while less regional connectivity forms underestimated bias. These findings provide a mechanistic account for the construction of metacognitive systematic bias.

No strong support for a Dunning-Kruger effect in creativity: analyses of self-assessment in absolute and relative terms.

Competencies related to the evaluation of own cognitive processes, called metacognitive monitoring, are crucial as they help decide whether to persist in or desist from cognitive efforts. One of the most well-known phenomena in this context-the Dunning-Kruger effect-is that less skilled people tend to overestimate their performance. This effect has been reported for various kinds of performance including creativity. More recently, however, it has been suggested that this phenomenon could be a statistical artifact caused by the better-than-average effect and by regression toward the mean. Therefore, we examined the Dunning-Kruger effect in the context of creative thinking performance (i.e., divergent thinking ability) across two studies (Study 1: N = 425; Study 2: N = 317) and applied the classical quartile-based analysis as well as newly recommended, advanced statistical approaches: the Glejser test of heteroscedasticity and nonlinear quadratic regression. We found that the results indeed depended on the employed statistical method: While classical analyses supported the Dunning-Kruger effect across all conditions, it was not consistently supported by the more advanced statistical methods. These findings are in line with recent work challenging certain assumptions of the Dunning-Kruger effect and we discuss factors that undermine accurate self-assessments, especially in the context of creative performance.

Neural correlates of retrospective memory confidence during face-name associative learning.

The ability to accurately assess one's own memory performance during learning is essential for adaptive behavior, but the brain mechanisms underlying this metamemory function are not well understood. We investigated the neural correlates of memory accuracy and retrospective memory confidence in a face-name associative learning task using magnetoencephalography in healthy young adults (n = 32). We found that high retrospective confidence was associated with stronger occipital event-related fields during encoding and widespread event-related fields during retrieval compared to low confidence. On the other hand, memory accuracy was linked to medial temporal activities during both encoding and retrieval, but only in low-confidence trials. A decrease in oscillatory power at alpha/beta bands in the parietal regions during retrieval was associated with higher memory confidence. In addition, representational similarity analysis at the single-trial level revealed distributed but differentiable neural activities associated with memory accuracy and confidence during both encoding and retrieval. In summary, our study unveiled distinct neural activity patterns related to memory confidence and accuracy during associative learning and underscored the crucial role of parietal regions in metamemory.

Characterising the role of awareness in ensemble perception.

Ensemble representations are efficient codes that the brain generates effortlessly even under noisy conditions. However, the role of visual awareness for computing ensemble representations remains unclear. We present two psychophysical experiments (N = 15 × 2) using a bias-free paradigm to investigate the contribution of conscious and unconscious processing to ensemble perception. Here, we show that ensemble perception can unfold without awareness of the relevant features that define the ensemble. Computational modeling of the type-1 and type-2 drift-rates further suggest that awareness lags well behind the categorization processes that support ensemble perception. Additional evidence indicates that the dissociation between type-1 from type-2 sensitivity, was not driven by the type-2 inefficiency or a systematic disadvantage in type-2 decision making. The present study demonstrates the utility of robust measures for studying the role of visual consciousness and metacognition in stimuli and tasks of increasing complexity, crucially, without underestimating the contribution of unconscious processing in an otherwise visible stimulus. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Bayes Optimal Integration of Social and Endogenous Uncertainty in Numerosity Estimation.

One of the most prominent social influences on human decision making is conformity, which is even more prominent when the perceptual information is ambiguous. The Bayes optimal solution to this problem entails weighting the relative reliability of cognitive information and perceptual signals in constructing the percept from self-sourced/endogenous and social sources, respectively. The current study investigated whether humans integrate the statistics (i.e., mean and variance) of endogenous perceptual and social information in a Bayes optimal way while estimating numerosities. Our results demonstrated adjustment of initial estimations toward group means only when group estimations were more reliable (or "certain"), compared to participants' endogenous metric uncertainty. Our results support Bayes optimal social conformity while also pointing to an implicit form of metacognition.

Metacognitive evaluation of postdecisional perceptual representations.

Perceptual confidence is thought to arise from metacognitive processes that evaluate the underlying perceptual decision evidence. We investigated whether metacognitive access to perceptual evidence is constrained by the hierarchical organization of visual cortex, where high-level representations tend to be more readily available for explicit scrutiny. We found that the ability of human observers to evaluate their confidence did depend on whether they performed a high-level or low-level task on the same stimuli, but was also affected by manipulations that occurred long after the perceptual decision. Confidence in low-level perceptual decisions degraded with more time between the decision and the response cue, especially when backward masking was present. Confidence in high-level tasks was immune to backward masking and benefitted from additional time. These results can be explained by a model assuming confidence heavily relies on postdecisional internal representations of visual stimuli that degrade over time, where high-level representations are more persistent.

The neural representation of metacognition in preferential decision-making.

Humans regularly assess the quality of their judgements, which helps them adjust their behaviours. Metacognition is the ability to accurately evaluate one's own judgements, and it is assessed by comparing objective task performance with subjective confidence report in perceptual decisions. However, for preferential decisions, assessing metacognition in preference-based decisions is difficult because it depends on subjective goals rather than the objective criterion. Here, we develop a new index that integrates choice, reaction time, and confidence report to quantify trial-by-trial metacognitive sensitivity in preference judgements. We found that the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) and the right anterior insular were more activated when participants made bad metacognitive evaluations. Our study suggests a crucial role of the dmPFC-insula network in representing online metacognitive sensitivity in preferential decisions.

The impact of reading metacognitive strategies on mathematics learning efficiency and performance: An analysis using PISA 2018 data in China.

The current study employed latent profile analysis to examine the application patterns of students' reading metacognitive strategies using PISA 2018 data in China. Subsequently, it explored the differences in students' mathematics learning efficiency and performance. The results revealed that: (1) Six types of reading metacognitive strategies application patterns were identified: "Novice - indifferent," "Veteran - average," "Novice - low evaluating," "Veteran - skilled," "Novice - mixed," and "Novice - arbitrary." (2) The primary factors that affect the classification of reading metacognitive strategies application patterns were gender, and family economic, social, and cultural statuses (ESCS). (3) Mathematics learning time could positively predict performance overall, but the mathematics learning time of "Veteran - skilled" and "Novice - mixed" students had no significant correlation with their mathematics performance. The findings suggests that educators should not blindly increase students' mathematics learning time but instead provide appropriate guidance based on their mastery patterns of reading metacognitive strategies to enhance mathematics learning efficiency and performance.